digi2t

Thanks for the correction Wez, you're absolutely right, I erred on the description of the switch. Yup, your setup was already on top of my list, I was just wondering if anyone had any other exotic ideas. Thanks Wez. As always, on top of your game.

Hi all, Well, this is the deal. I've got a 5 way super switch (24 pole), 2 - 500ohm push/pull pots (volumes), and 1 - 500 pot (for tone). I'm planning on stuffing all of this into an Ibanez RG470, which I've swapped out all 3 pups for 4 conductor models. Now... I've got some basic ideas of what I'd like to wire and how, but I would also appreciate any and all input from the membership. If anyone has done some really fancy wiring on their axes, and would like to share, I would be forever greatful. One thing for sure though, I'm not going for any out of phase configurations, or I would prefer to stay away from them. I've already got a couple of guitars setup for that. They don't suit wah work very well, unless I'm going for some really freaky/sqeaky noises. Anyway, I've already consulted the usual Guitar Electronic, Seymour Duncan, etc. sites and drawings. I'm more interested in personal opinions, so let 'er rip people... I'm all ears. Thanks to all in advance.

I just installed the X2N clones in my last build. Bridge is not bad, but neck is a bit muddy for my tastes.

Looks like something off a "Sears-o-caster". I just picked up a mid 60's Japanese import plank, and while it doesn't sport a trem, it does have a single screw in the middle to hold the cover on.

How about stranded CAT5 cable? Tends to be more reliable when using puch-down connectors.

Wouldn't the fact that it's solid core be somewhat detrimental at the solder points? I mean, I was taught a long time ago that soldering a solid core wire was less than desireable, since it creates a weak point in the wire next to the solder. Hence, any mechanical movement (i.e. vibration) will cause failure of the wire, generally, at this point. Stranded wire has the capacity to spread the load or stress between the strands. Just a thought... Cheers

New version of a "DNA" guitar?

Check this; Ampeg amp Never heard an Ampeg bass amp that didn't sound good. Hope it helps. Cheers

I decided to email this yahoo, asking him why he was selling info that was already available for free on this site. Here is his response; Dear ******, The information now is far past anything on Project Guitar. I talk about dipping methods. Names of paint that work and are affordable in large quanities and can be customized. I explain techniques how to swirl your paint. Not just brush like a tard. Plus alot more. The Project Guitar site was made to throw people off track. It gets your feet wet and I tell you how to do swirls that you will be happy with. I can tell you how to swirl like the guys selling swirl bodies on ebay. The information I provided at first is far behind what Im selling now. Experienced Swirl vets have even commented I might leave out some simple techniques to keep their business alive. LOL Have I sold this info to you? -tiggie_00 I was tempted to repond to his question at the end with another email i.e. "No, because I may be crazy, but I'm not STUPID!!", but I'll take the high road on this one. Cheers

UPDATE... No go on the 4X12 cabs yet, but I did get the FCB 1010. Also, just ordered a MIDI relay board kit, so the Stereo A/B/Y plus panning and volume will soon be a reality via the FCB 1010. YEEEEE HAAAAWWW. Cheers.

OK, here goes.... GFS "Lil Killer". I've got a 10K in the middle of my RG. Sounds great and it's splittable to boot. Personally, I was impressed enough to buy a set of "Dream 180"'s. Then they impressed me enough to buy a set of "Crunchy PAF"'s. So far so good. For about 160$ I outfitted 3 guitars with very decent (to my ears) sounding pickups. If you don't want to break the bank, try them. Besides, with the "Killer"'s, you won't have to route your Strat or mod the pickgaurd. And with some creative wiring, judicious choice of cap(s), and splitting, you cover a whole HECK of a lot of territory. At worst, you can experiment... without having to remorgage your home. Here's the link; GFS pickups That's my 2 bits. Good luck and as always... Cheers.

Lends a whole new meaning to the idea of "active pickups"... Is that the Krakatoa Poof42 model by any chance?

How about a MIDI looper? Kittyhawk MIDI looper and/or Ground Control come to mind. I know it's a pricey solution, but I believe it would ultimately solve your dilemma (including any in the future ). With a programable MIDI foot controller (FCB1010, X-15, or Flight Path for example) you could then create presets in the controller to call up your desired sound. Cheers

Just to open a sidebar on the silicone. Absolutely correct insofar as silicone and fisheyes is concerned. Silicone is an insidious product around ANY paint products. I worked painting helicopters for 5 years and I ran into a hell of a problem one time. In the process of shooting the final color (of 3) on a Huey tailboom, fisheyes started popping up all over. After they defibbed me, we traced it to a silicone glue product that Bell requires to glue on the door seals on Jet Rangers. The mechanic was using the product on the otherside of the hanger, and the FUMES drifted over to the booth. At 600$ a gallon for the AlumiGrip, it was a very expensive lesson. Just something to keep in mind. Cheers

Why didn't you just install it the other way round? That's what I did with my external GK in my JEM and it works fine. You just have to configure your VG box so it knows you're that way round. Or perhaps that's only possible with the VG-99? Was this not possible with the VG-88 and VG-8? Not all Roland guitar synths have that option, the older ones in particular. Precisely. I read in several places plus the manual that this was a no no for the GK2A pup. Besides, doesn`t bother me at all, so bonus. Cheers

Tom Morello and Vernon Reid. These two pushed me into exploring the "organized chaos of sound" aspect of guitar. To a slight degree, The Edge, but not for the guitar work, mostly for the delay work. Oh yeah, Niel Young. Taught me that you can solo on one note forever. Just make sure that it's presented properly. Cheers

The external GK2A pickup is equipped with a plug to the board. I recently took one apart and installed it as an internal on my explorer. It's a job and a half to do, and I don't think I'll do it again. I had to unsolder the pup lead and transfer the wires to the underside of the pu for a cleaner look. I also had to extension the 13 pin plug. Not to mention routering the jack end of the guitar to incorporate the 2 jacks and the body for the board. See the pics below; Finished view Pup view Internal layout Internal closeup Jack plate Key ingredients (apart from the usual woodworking affair); A good soldering iron, solder vacuum, small curved hemostat clamp, and heatshrink. You may notice the connector that I installed between the board and the output jack. This was done to keep the installation somewhat modular. If the board screws up, I can just pop it out and put in a new one. Oh yeah, I almost forgot... lay off the caffine and candy bars for about a week before attempting this. The wires are tiny and the soldering tedious. About 5 to 6 hours of work including modifing the pickgaurd. I cut up the external casing and used it as a template for this. Cheers

By "intake fans", do you mean that the fan was on the door side of the booth? If that's the case, this is a reverse flow booth. the fans still exhaust in this case. Another impracticallity of intake fans would be if your recovery filters on the exhaust side get too blocked up with paint, you would not be able to close the doors on the booth. I know that due to new enviornmental standards everyone is switching to water based products, but unfortunately I haven't had the chance to try any yet. All my experience has been with base/clears, acrylic enamels, polyurethanes, and some epoxy based stuff. Logic would dictate that the booth (cross-flow or down-draft) really shouldn't affect anything. I think temperature, humidity, pressure, and spray equipment would be the primary concerns. I don't see any body shops having to replace a 40000$ heated, water-recovery, down-draft booth just because they switch to water-base products. Cheers.

A buddy of mine built a booth in his garage. He used home heating furnace filters for the air intake on the door. For the exhaust he found a second hand 12" belt driven axial tube fan. The motor is open frame, but isolated from the fumes. Here's an example picture; I think he came across it at an auction for some company that was going out of business. Cost him 100$. Works nice. As a side note, I've painted cars, bikes, guitars, and even helicopters, but I've never come across a booth with the fan on the intake side, always on the exhaust. Putting a fan on the intake side would just create too much turbulence inside the booth. You want to have as large a surface area as possible for the air coming into the booth to minimize air turbulence. This cuts down on dust movement, and in some cases "orange-peeling". Cheers.

Current gear; Guitars: Ibanez RG570 Dillion Explorer w/intregrated 13 pin synth out Custom made Flying V Custom made Strat (Mustang neck) First Act VW guitar (Collection piece, still in the wrapper) Bouzouki (skinny 8 string lute thingy) Rack: DOD 2/3 octave stereo EQ BBE 422 Sonic Maximizer Korg SDD 3300 Digitech 3600 delay Digitech 4000 delay Roland GR-50 M-Audio stereo preamp QSC 1450 stereo amp (yeeeeah baby!!!!) Floor: Digitech GNX3 X-15 midi foot controller Digitech RP-7 (sometimes, depends on my mood) Custom made stereo A/B/Y switch Cabs: (Actually amps, but I only use the speakers driven by the QSC) Gibson G-115 2 X 12" (left channel) Ampeg G-212 2 X 12" (right channel) Misc: Laptop for MIDI tweaking the GNX3, X-15, SDD3300 and GR-50 Want: Two 4 X 12" slant cabs (can stop simply knocking my neighbours dentures out. Rip his whole face off instead) Stereo A/B/Y Panning/Volume pedal (working on it) FCB 1010 (can do what the X-15 can't) Dear Santa...

I posted this in January: Stereo ABY You can scale down the diagram to mono and no Y as required, and all the required parts are listed. What ever blows your skirt up. This includes the type of switches that I used which are a bit pricey, but very, very quiet. LED and optional tuner wiring is included as well. With time, I found that the only mod that I would make would be to add a third "Y" LED instead of having both the A and B LED's come on during Y mode. This would allow you to know which channel your coming back to when coming out of Y. In the heat of things, I sometimes forget which channel I was in originally before I go to Y. This is only a problem when I'm in A, go Y, but I want to come out in B. Anyway, I haven't gotten around to rewiring it yet, but if anyone needs this mod, let me know and I'll post it. In any case, whether mono or stereo, if you want LED's, you need a TPDT switch. 2 poles for sound, and the third for the LED's. Hence, the pricey switch. Cheers

You need a DPDT switch. One half for the vibrato switching, the other for the LED. I don't know about Twin Reverb, but about 2 weeks ago I made a double foot switch for a clients Fender 75. The LED's in this instance are powered by the amp. In your case, if you go with a 9V battery, create a loop with the other half of the switch. One pole of the switch to + pole of the battery. The other pole to a 1.5Kohm resistor, to your LED, to the - of the battery. Don't forget, LED's have polarity. If you LED doesn't light, switch the leads around. If you you look closely at the LED, you'll notice 2 elements, one larger than the other. The larger element goes to negative or ground. In any case, you'll have to remember to turn off the LED when your done with the pedal, or you'll run down the battery. Cheers.

For what it's worth, "hot" is not always "good" depending on your set up. From my experience if you're into straight tube amps, then using a hotter pickups will allow you to push the amp to "break up" earlier. Even then, that depends on the amp circuitry, tubes, etc. The pickup ultimately acts as an other gain factor. If your using transistor or power amps with processors for gain or overdrive, a really hot pickup is the last thing you want a high volume levels. It turns into a real squellarama. In this case, you start having to sacrifice or "detune" your tone via the guitars volume. Case in point; I use 2 different rigs. One consists of a Traynor Custom Special head, and a 4X12 cab. The other is a stereo setup, GNX3, GR-50, EQ, and several delays and othe noise makers fed to a QSC RMX1450 feeding 2 2X12 cabs (left and right channel). Now, I have one guitar loaded with Motherbuckers which weigh in at around 20K on the ohm scale. The Traynor will just scream with these suckers, but I don't even think about using them with my other rig unless I'm running hyper clean, or standing about a half-mile away from the cabs. With my stereo rig I've found that 10 or 11Kohm is the MAX that I want to run and still have enough flexibility to really play with the gain. 6 to 8Kohms really allow me to explore the tone spectrum from one end to the other with the stereo rig, but sound really lethargic with the Traynor. In a nut shell, a friend of mine who is also an avid golfer remarked once; Finding the right pickup is like finding just the right club. Part style, part feel, part trial and error, and part black magic. Cheers.

For your treb bleed mod, I found after weeks of fiddling with all my guitars, there is no hard or fast rule. I'm running with a variety of pups, Golden Age, Motherbuckers, and a bevy of different GFS models. I've found that in the end, in most cases, no two guitars are running the same value caps. It's an "ear and feel" thing. My cap values vary from 68pf to .022uf depending on the model and position. Even for the tone, I got one at .022uf, another at .033uf, and yet another at .047uf. It was trial and error from start to finish. My advice, get a value pack of caps from a local electronics shop, warm up your soldering iron, and put the amp on standby. Happy hunting.

Black_labb's routine and a 25 watter works just fine. I've always used a 25 watt iron. Admittedly, a pot is quite the heatsink, but if your patient the 25 watt iron does an admirable job. And yes, there's nothing like a brand new tip. It's almost like Christmas... before you started getting clothes as gifts. Cheers